Download PDF | Mark Merrony - The Plight of Rome in the Fifth Century AD, Routledge, 2017.
244 Pages
The Plight of Rome in the Fifth Century AD argues that the fall of the western Roman empire was rooted in a signifi cant drop in war booty, agricultural productivity, and mineral resources. Merrony proposes that a dependency on the three economic components was established with the Principate, when a precedent was set for an unsustainable threshold on military spending. Drawing on literary and archaeological data, this volume establishes a correspondence between booty (in the form of slaves and precious metals) from foreign campaigns and public building programmes, and how this equilibrium was upset after the empire reached its full expansion and began to contract in the third century. It is contended that this trend was exacerbated by the systematic loss of agricultural productivity (principally grain, but also livestock), as successive barbarian tribes were settled and wrested control from the imperial authorities in the fi fth century.
Merrony explores how Rome was weakened and divided, unable to pay its army, feed its people, or support the imperial bureaucracy – and how this contributed to its administrative collapse. Mark Merrony is a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (both in the UK). He specializes in Roman archaeology and history, and has undertaken fi eldwork in Britain, France, and the Levant. Socio-economic Aspects of Late Roman Mosaic Pavements in Phoenicia and Northern Palestine was published in 2013, and he has authored several peer-reviewed papers on the subject.
Preface
As an archaeologist, with a special interest in the Roman period, one of the questions that crops up in conversation quite often is ‘why did Rome fall?’ Ever since I was asked this I have not been able to give a definitive answer, although I have had some thoughts about it, and the idea of writing a book on this subject has been rattling around in my mind for some years. Taking all of the literature published into consideration, the demise of Rome has coalesced into fall verses transformation. I have always been fascinated more by cause than process. Scrutiny of primary texts has, perhaps, made it easier to establish the nature of what happened, but deciphering the cause of these events is more difficult.
The why question is a well-trodden path, and the time is certainly not ripe to readdress this issue, but the multitude of reasons given for the loss of the Roman state over the years makes it as intriguing and relevant today as it was in the eighteenth century. Its timing is also appropriate, written in the two hundred and fortieth year since the publication of Edward Gibbon’s fi rst volume of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For reasons that are made apparent in the Introduction, the present book starts early for a study on the fall of Rome – in the Augustan period. Grappling with the primary sources presented a challenge, as did making sense of the vast corpus of archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic material that is available for interpretation. The written and material records are of course only two layers of the issue, since the Roman empire encompassed such a vast territory and embedded in its long durée are fluctuating cultural, demographic, economic, political, and religious factors to consider. I am indebted to innumerable archaeological and historical studies that have made this book possible to write, and also the three anonymous peer reviewers whose comments were especially welcome.
Any follies that may emerge are entirely my own. This publication will inevitably provoke debate in light of the fact that it deals with such a thought-provoking topic, which has been endlessly discussed, and this will continue to be the case. Also, at Routledge, I thank Amy Davis-Poynter, Lizzi Thomasson, and Geraldine Martin for helping me develop this project. The academic environment at Wolfson College, Oxford was an inspiration, and I am grateful to Christopher Howgego, Philip Kay, and Susan Walker, who freely gave their time to discuss ideas related to this book, as did Alan Bowman and Martin Henig, in the congenial atmosphere of the Ashmolean Museum. Thanks also to Alexandra Hamburger and Olympia Bobou for kindly reading and commenting on the manuscript. Mark Merrony Oxford, December 2016
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